The Elizabethans and Islam

Summary

Podcast Summary: Not Just the Tudors – The Elizabethans and Islam

Podcast Information
Title: Not Just the Tudors
Host: Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Guest: Professor Jerry Broughton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London
Episode: The Elizabethans and Islam
Release Date: May 5, 2025
Description:
Professor Suzannah Lipscomb delves into the intricate relationships between Elizabethan England and the Islamic world, challenging traditional Tudor narratives by exploring diplomatic, commercial, and cultural exchanges that have long been understudied.

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Introduction to Elizabethan-Islamic Relations

Professor Suzannah Lipscomb opens the episode by highlighting the conventional focus on elite figures like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan foreign policy. However, she introduces a paradigm shift by questioning whether Elizabethan England was truly a dominant imperial power or rather a secondary player interacting with more formidable Islamic empires such as Spain, Persia, and the Ottomans.

Professor Jerry Broughton concurs, emphasizing that his research uncovers "incredible stories about encounters and transactions between Muslims and Elizabethan Protestants” that significantly alter our understanding of the period. He references his book, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (timestamp [02:12]).

The Moroccan Ambassador’s Visit (1600)

One of the pivotal moments discussed is the visit of a Moroccan ambassador, Al Onouri, to Elizabeth I’s court in November 1600 (Julian calendar) ([04:18]). Broughton explains that this delegation aimed to establish an Anglo-Islamic alliance against Catholic Spain. Despite its significance, the alliance faltered due to Elizabeth's existing ties with the Ottomans, leading to its eventual dissolution upon her death.

Key Quote:
"Elizabeth is too concerned that it might conflict with a much longer standing closer alliance with the Ottomans." ([04:18] Jerry Broughton)

Overlooked Connections with the Islamic World

Broughton attributes the historical oversight to a "cultural nationalism" that prioritizes English national narratives and New World encounters over Old World interactions with Africa and Asia ([07:09]). He points out that merchants played a crucial role in these exchanges, often operating under the radar of mainstream historical accounts.

Key Quote:
"There are all these different moments, different kinds of encounters, but there's a consistency to it. There's a consistency to the way in which the Elizabethan state is working with the Islamic world, primarily because it's an attempt to deal with the threat from Spanish Catholicism." ([09:16] Jerry Broughton)

Language and Terminology Barriers

A significant barrier to recognizing these connections has been the absence of specific terminology such as "Muslim" or "Islam" in the English language until the early 17th century. Instead, terms like "Ottomans," "Saracens," and "Moors" were used, causing fragmentation in the historical narrative ([09:16] Jerry Broughton).

Key Quote:
"The terms Islam and Muslim do not enter the English language until the 1610s, 1620s." ([09:16] Jerry Broughton)

Merchants as Cultural Bridges

Anthony Jenkinson, a merchant active in the mid-16th century, serves as a prime example of these overlooked connections. His travels to Aleppo and Persia established early commercial ties between England and the Islamic world, facilitating not just trade but also cultural and theological exchanges ([12:42] Jerry Broughton).

Key Quote:
"Jenkinson is amazing because he meets a sultan... It leads to all kinds of unintended consequences. English men and women who are converting to Islam in the 1570s." ([26:13] Jerry Broughton)

William Harborne and the Capitulations

Another standout figure is William Harborne, who in 1578 secured the Capitulations—a groundbreaking commercial and diplomatic agreement with the Ottoman Empire. This pact granted English merchants preferential trading rights within Ottoman territories and remained in effect until the empire's collapse in 1922 ([35:35] Jerry Broughton).

Key Quote:
"The Capitulations... it's one of the longest standing diplomatic and commercial deals in English history." ([35:35] Jerry Broughton)

Cultural and Literary Reflections

The profound interactions between Elizabethan England and the Islamic world are mirrored in contemporary literature. Plays featuring Muslim characters, such as Shakespeare’s Othello, reflect the era's complex and ambivalent attitudes towards Islam and Muslims ([50:19] Professor Susannah Lipscomb).

Key Quote:
"There is a sense in which that's why the drama is so important... Othello is so cracklingly still alive." ([51:00] Jerry Broughton)

Victorian Scholarship and Its Limitations

Broughton critiques Victorian-era scholarship for constructing a skewed narrative of the Renaissance and Tudor periods, emphasizing British imperial superiority while neglecting the rich tapestry of international relations, including those with the Islamic world ([12:42] Jerry Broughton).

Key Quote:
"The Hakluyt Society work... was about editing that work and creating and sort of literally whitewashing a version of cultural encounter in this period." ([19:39] Jerry Broughton)

Religious Dynamics and Conversions

The episode explores the religious complexities of the time, highlighting instances of English Protestants converting to Islam and the limited records of conversely, Muslims adopting Anglicanism. These conversions underscore the deep theological and cultural exchanges occurring beneath the surface of political alliances ([44:13] Jerry Broughton).

Key Quote:
"There are thousands of English men and, increasingly, women who convert to Islam... But for converters to Anglicanism, there's only one record." ([44:13] Jerry Broughton)

The Untapped Potential of Anglo-Islamic Alliances

Despite initial attempts, the envisioned joint Anglo-Islamic attacks against Spanish forces never materialized. Broughton attributes this to the shifting political priorities of the Ottomans and the fragmented alliances within the Islamic world, particularly between the Ottomans and the Moroccans ([47:15] Jerry Broughton).

Key Quote:
"The Ottomans don't see it as realistic. The Moroccans come closest to doing it, but the alliances are always so shifting." ([47:15] Jerry Broughton)

Conclusion: Revisiting Tudor Narratives

Professor Susannah Lipscomb and Professor Jerry Broughton conclude by emphasizing the importance of reevaluating Tudor history to include these multifaceted interactions with the Islamic world. This enriched narrative not only offers a more comprehensive understanding of Elizabethan England but also provides valuable insights into contemporary issues of nationalism and cultural identity.

Key Quote:
"We're trying to be truthful in the stories we tell about the past and that the richer and the fuller the picture that we can give, the more we're going to resemble the past." ([19:39] Professor Suzannah Lipscomb)

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Notable Takeaways:

• Elizabethan England maintained significant, though often overlooked, diplomatic and commercial relations with the Islamic world.
• Merchants like Anthony Jenkinson and William Harborne played pivotal roles in bridging England with Ottoman and Persian empires.
• Victorian scholarship's emphasis on British imperialism has limited the recognition of these Anglo-Islamic interactions.
• Cultural exchanges influenced literature, as evidenced in Shakespearean plays featuring Muslim characters.
• Religious dynamics were complex, with instances of both Protestant and Islamic conversions, reflecting deeper theological engagements.
• The anticipated Anglo-Islamic military alliances against Spain were thwarted by shifting geopolitical landscapes and internal Islamic world dynamics.

This episode of Not Just the Tudors invites listeners to rethink established historical narratives, shedding light on a more interconnected and globally engaged Elizabethan England.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb.

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[Jerry Broughton]

Hello.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to.

Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.

The podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Our perspective on late Tudor foreign policy has been dominated by Both the story of the elites at the Elizabethan court and by Victorian ideas about the foundations of empire Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh have often featured. But what if we were to turn our picture of the Elizabethan geopolitical world on its head? What if it's not really about the power and nascent empire of England, but about England as a bit player interacting with far more powerful empires? Spain, Persia and the Ottomans? An Islamic empire that spanned three continents and ruled an estimated 15 million people. Today's guest has taken this different approach. Jerry Brougham is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. In 2016, he published a fabulous book called this or Orient Isle, Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. And that's the story which he tells in today's episode, which we first released in September 2021. It's a story of encounters and transactions between Muslims and Elizabethan Protestants and it upends our understanding. Professor Broughton Jerry, it's wonderful to have you on here. I'm so excited to talk to you about these things which I think don't yet form part of our idea of the Tudors. And it's so important to connect them into the wider world. I wondered if we could start by doing that. As you start in your book, you talk about the visit of a Moroccan ambassador to the court of Elizabeth I in 1009 in the Muslim calendar, or November 1600 in the Julian Christian calendar. Tell us about this delegation and why it was so extraordinary.

[Jerry Broughton]

It is extraordinary because it really culminates about 40, 50 years of Tudor relations with the Islamic world. And this is a very specific encounter which is what we would now call with Morocco. So he's also known as Al Onouri, so I'm going to call him that as well. There are two ways in which this guy is referred to, but he comes as part of a high level diplomatic delegation in 1600 to London to work with Elizabeth to set up an Anglo Islamic alliance against the Spanish. He's a highly educated multilingual figure. There's a portrait that survived, which is in the Shakespeare Institute, that nobody's known what to do with forever. And now the history tells us that it's a very significant diplomatic moment because Elizabeth is in alliance with various Islamic kingdoms, including Morocco. Al Anourdi comes to set up an alliance. It's a diplomatic and a military alliance. He stays on the Strand. He comes with a delegation. There are accounts of how he worships, how he eats food halal. He meets Elizabeth twice. There's a high level agreement that they're going to have an alliance between Elizabeth and the Moroccan kingdom in alliance against the Catholics, against Spain. It doesn't come off, but it doesn't come off because Elizabeth is too concerned that it might conflict with a much longer standing closer alliance with the Ottomans. Now, again, this is just news to I think, most people who look at the Tudors because you don't think of that level of connection with the Islamic world, but in fact, it's absolutely integral to the diplomacy, to the culture, to the politics of Elizabethan England. So it doesn't come off. The alliance doesn't sort of prosper, and Elizabeth dies shortly afterwards. But the visit, I think, is extraordinary. People talk about how powerful this figure is, how significant it is, and within a year, Shakespeare writes Othello. So there are interesting connections. I'm not explicitly saying Alnoury is Othello and vice versa, but this guy is so visible that I think that Shakespeare is aware of that level of Anglo Islamic connections which have been going on throughout his lifetime. The drama of the period is replete with figures from that world. And it's just been there, hidden in plain view. He was hidden in plain view. That longer history of culture, diplomacy and trade with the Islamic world has been hidden in plain view. And it's just something that hasn't been recognized. And I think there are obvious reasons for that. It's a sort of focus on an English national approach to what the Tudors are about. There is a notion that there's a New world encounter, but certainly not with Islam. And many people would say, to me, this is scandalous, absolutely extraordinary. Is this really true? I remember when I wrote it, my editor just said, I don't believe that there's this level of connection between the Islamic world and Tudor England. But there it is. It's there in the archives, it's there in the material culture, it's there in the paintings of the period. We've just missed it.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hmm. Isn't that interesting? I wonder why? Do you have any thoughts?

[Jerry Broughton]

Well, part of it, I think, is that sort of notion of cultural nationalism that we've tended to focus on, obviously, elite royal politics. We don't look at merchants and, as it were, on the ground, exchanges. So much of the book was about that, the way in which the merchants are quietly transacting and doing business with Persia, with what we now call Turkey, with the Ottoman Empire, with Northwest Africa. So I think that it's your focus where you look. And I think that that notion of an encounter with what's often being regarded as an alien culture like Islam. Many scholars and critics sort of knew and they touched on this, but they just didn't want to go there. It was unrecognizable, they couldn't understand it. It was a culture that they didn't really understand. I think High Renaissance and Tudor cultural history from the 19th century has bled out those cross cultural encounters beyond the New world ones. That's always been the focus. Rarely do you get that encounter with what you might call the old world of Africa and Asia. And there's probably a personal connection. You know, I grew up in Bradford in the 1980s, so I was hanging out with Muslim, you know, Hindu and Sikh kids. And it wasn't that, that was somehow an idealized moment. There was a lot of conflict, there was a lot of racism, to be frank. But I think it attuned me when I was doing work in this field to sort of keep bumping up against this material and going, there is this connection. Every great Tudor figure, you name any of them, Essex, Leicester, Walsingham, they all have some finger in a pie of a diplomatic or commercial or political or military connection to the Islamic world. And as I say, many people have said to me since, wow, we just missed this. We just didn't see it. And that's always kind of quite exciting. I think, as you know, when you do that archival research, you break open a new element of the story.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Absolutely. And do you think something about it might be about terms? They weren't using the term Muslim? They probably weren't using the words Islamic world. I mean, what terms were they using? And do you think that's part of it?

[Jerry Broughton]

Absolutely, I think that's a big deal. You know, the terms Islam and Muslim do not enter the English language. You look it up in the OED, it's really in the 1610s, 1620s, that that language first starts to appear. So I think you're absolutely right. The language that's is a series of synonyms. So if you talk about Ottomans, that's a catch all for people who are broadly regarded as, or vaguely understood in this period as being Muslim. Saracen, you know, Ottomite, Persians, Moors, term more is just again, it's this catch all term. So I think you're right because when I started doing the book initially I wanted to call it Shakespeare in Islam. And people said that's just too provocative. You know, Shakespeare does not have an understanding of Islam. But I kept saying, but you see so much of the drama, you think of Marlowe's Tamburlain, you know, he's a Scythian, but he's encountering Ottoman sultans and Moors and Saracens and Persians and all these various synonyms that are an attempt to understand English Protestant. And that's very important Protestant connection with what they see as what we would now broadly call the Islamic world. You know, in the field still, it's been broken down. So Miranda Kaufman has done great work on black Tudors, talking about the idea of the Moors and that that obviously is a racial dimension. I look at that work and say, absolutely applaud it and say it's also a religious question, because all those figures that we're trying to reintegrate into the cultural history of the period are not only black, but they're Muslim. So the work gets sort of broken down into different bits. Many people talk about the Ottomans and the Turkish presence in this period. Some talk about Moors, some talk about Persia. Persia's become a big thing. A lot of people writing about that. So I think you're right. It's about the language that's being used, the misunderstanding of that religious encounter. What do people in, say, the 1560s think when they encounter somebody who is of the Muslim faith? And it's also about how broken up that is. So my attempt really was to just try and pull a bit of that together and say there are all these different moments, different kinds of encounters, but there's a consistency to it. There's a consistency to a way in which the Elizabethan state is working with the Islamic world, primarily because it's an attempt to deal with the threat from Spanish Catholicism. So my enemy's enemy is my friend in this respect. So you reach out to the Islamic world in various facets. The Ottomans, the North African Moroccan kingdoms, and then also Persia. But what comes with that? Again, if you look at, as it were, people on the ground, the sort of lost history of people who are just trying to work and accommodate and trade and transact in the Mediterranean. It leads to all kinds of unintended consequences. English men and women who are converting to Islam in the 1570s, this has been a story that's been completely hidden. And people who said, you know what, in the 1570s, Islam might look like a better option than Protestantism in England, which might be snuffed out any minute by the Spanish. So once we sort of rethink that sort of religious political dynamic, I think the whole look of what's going on changes in this period.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

That's really interesting. And I suppose, actually there's evidence that the fascination of Protestant Christians Perhaps we could say with the Islamic world actually predates the Elizabethans. Other examples that you can give us from earlier in that century.

[Jerry Broughton]

So there is an interest that you get in the early Tudors. So Henry viii notably, is fascinated by the Ottomans, because one thing that happens is that in terms of all those geopolitical and imperial games that are played between the French and the Spanish and the Ottomans and the Tudors, Henry, of course, wants to be at that top table. There is a moment in the 1530s when there's a proposed alliance between Henry VIII, Francis the First, and Suleiman the Magnificent. Anybody goes into the National Gallery and looks at the ambassadors, the Ambassadors in 1533 is about the possibility of that kind of alliance. The French are already politically and diplomatically in bed with the Ottomans. That's a much longer alliance. Henry wants to be part of that. It doesn't come off for various reasons, but that is seen as a sort of anti Spanish Catholic alliance, which is absolutely possible. And Henry then loves that. He dresses up in Ottoman outfits at parties. We forget again that when you look at the Tudor portraiture, what we might call the Oriental dimension is absolutely there. You look at the slashed outfits, the clothes that the women are wearing, particularly, you know, the silks, they're all Ottoman. The designs are all Ottoman. Now, we've tended to say that is therefore quintessentially Tudor Renaissance. Henry's kind of exoticizing it. There's no doubt it is an exoticization, but it's absolutely there. So that's there, really, in that earlier Tudor moment. And certainly under Mary, there's an attempt again to get to Persia. There's trade and travel with the Persian empire in the 1550s before Elizabeth comes to the throne. But I think what I noticed that the big shift. So you're right that there are those connections. But the big shift is 1570, when Elizabeth is excommunicated officially by the papacy. That leads to a kind of real break. And again, one of the things that's not noticed about that is that what Elizabeth says is, I have now been categorized as a heretic. So therefore, I can go and I'm outside a papal jurisdiction to work with other supposed heretics like Islam. So Protestants in the Catholic imagination are seen as heretics, just as Muslims are. So therefore, Elizabeth very candidly says, right, well, I'll turn that round and I'll make a strategic alliance with other supposed heresies. So that moment of excommunication, which is often taken into the questions about, you know, recusancy and what happens When Catholics have to basically take a stand against Elizabeth. All very true. And how that leads in the end to what happens to Mary, Queen of Scots. But at the same time, it creates an opportunity for reaching out to the Islamic world as inferiors. The Elizabethan state, Walsingham, Burley, Elizabeth, are all very clear. This is a greater imperial power. They are reaching out to them as subjects. We see this whole period through the raw end of the telescope. You know, this is not about the Elizabethans saying, come and trade with us. The Ottomans are like, you don't have anything that we want. We've got all the goodies that you want. We have all the power that you want. You want to work with us militarily, we can help. But you know what, you're a bit player. And it's important, I think, to just say, I think that comes back to the question you're asking. Why is it therefore being missed? And that's a tradition around Orientalism. So the Orientalist Myth through the 18th and 19th century, you know, that says the east is this kind of exotic but indolent and politically technologically backward player. Edward Said wrote about that in 1978. We all read that and we all absolutely got that. But Said himself admitted to me that he didn't get that in the Renaissance period. That's not how it looked in the Renaissance period. The Ottomans were the big player. They controlled as much territory, if not more, than Spain. So Elizabeth reaches out in the 1570s, pretty much as a supplicant, says, I want to be under your umbrella. And of course, the Ottomans say, the more the merrier. Our power resides in the fact that, yep, if you're Jewish, if you're Protestant, you can all come under our umbrella because we're so powerful, we don't really care. If you just want to trade with us, as long as you're not making war with us, then that's fine.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Actually, something I come back to quite a lot is the ways in which we distort things, because we've seen them through later centuries. You mentioned Miranda Kaufman's work or onyekanubia's, where they're saying, actually, when we look at the relationship between people who are of North African origin, who are ending, or African origin more broadly, actually, who are ending up in England in this period of time, we don't see them experiencing racism, because that's something that, I mean, this is arguable. The system of the Middle Passage and slavery across the Atlantic is entrenching the idea of racism. And it's same as true, as you say, about Orientalism. And I suppose the other thing is also an idea, since in the Victorian period, which is about empire and British superiority, and you've got to trace that back. So you trace that back to the Elizabethans and to Drake and Raleigh, and you can't admit at that point that the English are peripheral to geopolitics, really, at that point.

[Jerry Broughton]

I think you're absolutely right that the Victorian period is so crucial in shaping a version of what the Tudors are all about and what the Renaissance is all about. It's a moment where scholars like Jacob Burkhart, who writes the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, invents the term. It's a totally invented term. The 19th century invents the term Renaissance. And with that comes a sort of British imperial notion of what the Tudors are all about. An early moment of this confident, globalizing outreach into the New World, the formation of the East India Company and the foundations of the British Empire. It is a nonsense. It's a fantasy which is constructed by Victorian imperial power politics and also scholarship. So much of that scholarship, which is still very much embedded in what we do. The Hakluyt Society work that came out of that, it was about editing that work and creating and sort of literally whitewashing a version of cultural encounter in this period. And we're still working outwards, I think, from the consequences of that. Walter Pater's work on the Renaissance, all that stuff from the late 19th century is, I think, still very much shadowing how we talk about the birth of subjectivity. It's predominantly white and it's male. And as you know, with your work, and as I know with the work that I'm doing, that is an absolute nonsense. And that's the work, I guess, that we're now doing. It's not about trying to then invert things. It's about giving you a richer picture. You know, when we see the culture wars at the moment, and the way in which people say, oh, yeah, the way in which this is just completely taking down a certain notion or, you know, diminishing the achievements, it's not. It's about actually giving a much broader and more complicated and interesting picture. It's adding to that story. Not to say that there's not a critique, but it's just adding that different dimension. I think that that's so important to how we understand the period.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Absolutely. And I think also without wishing to sound like I'm enthralled to a kind of conviction that we can achieve objectivity in history. I do ultimately think that even if we don't think we can achieve it, we're trying to be truthful in the stories we tell about the past and that the richer and the fuller the picture that we can give, the more we're going to resemble the past. But, I mean, I would put my hands up and say, I mean, I have definitely peddled some of these things along the way. Totally mea culprit. I've been learning to unpick my own thinking in the past about the Tudor.

[Jerry Broughton]

Period, as I did. I mean, I had to do the same. I mean, coming through a system in the 80s and early 90s, I kept going, hang on, this is not what I've been taught. This is not the approach that I thought was true. It's like the same thing, say, with Elizabethan drama. There are 60 or 70 plays in this period which actually, from what survives, is quite a high count of plays which have significant Muslim characters or Muslim settings. We just missed it. You think about Marlowe's Tamburlaine, the Jew of Malta, and then you get into Shakespeare, goes Othello. But then you go, well, yeah, what about Titus Androicus that has a mora? What about even the Merchant of Venice? Because one of the suitors is the Prince of Morocco and all those other playwrights. Similarly, in the 1590s, everybody does a Turk play without exception. The irony is that. And people go, well, Shakespeare doesn't. And I've always said yes, because he can't do it anymore because there's too much stuff on the Turks. So he does mores. It's just always been there. And we taught it and we just bled it out. We didn't sort of comment on it. Decades of scholarship on Othello, which never really talked about the fact since Coleridge said, you know, he couldn't quite deal with the fact that Othello was a black man. And that's still carried on working through in the scholarship. So, no, you're absolutely right. It's a way of completely reinventing a sense of what the field is like and as you say, a form of objectivity to say, this material is there. Here it is. It's in the literature, it's in the archives, it's in the material culture. But I think, as you would know with the work you do, I think we also say all history is driven to some extent by histories of the present. We're just, I think, more alive to that than would have been happening, say, in the late Victorian period. So it still, of course, is driven by an agenda because we feel that putting that work out there is very important for our understanding of the present, how we got here. And I feel that very much. I mean, in this current moment, some of the work that I do since doing the book, some of the proudest stuff I've done is working with mosques, going to Hara Mosque and doing this work and giving this material and finding it deeply moving. When late middle aged Muslim women in the mosque say, why does it need you, a white middle aged professor, to come and tell us this story about inclusivity, about the presence of Islam so far back? Why have we not heard this story before? And it's very moving. And in our current moment and our current climate, I think of the nationalism and xenophobia and parochialism that we confront. We need more than ever, I think, to tell a different story about the Tudors, because that becomes such a litmus test, I think, of contemporary cultural understandings of Englishness. And there is a different story there.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So let's pick up on that story. And as you say, really crucially, things changed from 1570. But there's one thing before that I'd like us to touch on because you talk about the achievements of a 24 year old called Anthony Jenkinson and you say if the history of Anglo Ottoman relations begins anywhere, it's with him. So I think you have to tell us about him and what he did next.

[Jerry Broughton]

Anthony Jenkinson is extraordinary and he's part of this raft of people, of course, that don't survive very much in the record because they're not elite, they're mainly merchants working in the Mediterranean. There's no portraits of them. The stuff that survives is usually very dull commercial transactions. But what we do know about Jenkinson is that in the 1550s he's trading in what we would now call the Middle east in Aleppo. And he meets probably the most powerful man in the world, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who just happens to be kind of grooving through Aleppo on his way to fight the Persians. And Jenkinson makes the first commercial deal between an English trader and a Muslim ruler, which is kind of extraordinary. He meets Suleiman, he talks about what he's wearing, talks about his turban, talks about the silks he's wearing. Kind of amazing. He comes back to England, he then has a series of most amazing trips and travels. He works for the Muscovy Company and he goes through Russia. But again, it's this language that you pointed out before. The problem is people say Muscovy Company, Anthony Jenkinson. Oh, it's about Russia. What the Muscovy Company was really about was to try and get to Persia. He did in fact get to Persia. He gets to Kisvan in 1562, I think it was, and he meets the Shah. He tries to establish again a commercial deal. It only breaks down because the Shah says, I'm sorry, but I've just made a deal with the Ottomans. We've suddenly hit peace for a change, and I can't work with you. But Jenkinson comes back. He then does establish, really some terms for working with Persia. Persia's just too far. But he is amazing because, as I say in the book, you know, he meets a sultan, Ashar Anazar, because he meets the Russians. So this is kind of extraordinary as a way of thinking about cultural encounter driven by trade. But along the way, the stuff that comes out, I think, is fascinating. So Jenkinson talks about his encounters and he starts talking about the theological distinctions he sees on his travels between Sunni and Shia versions of Islam. Now, this is extraordinary. And when I talk about the book, I often say to audiences, here is an Englishman in the 1560s talking about the theological differences in Islam. How many people here could put their hand up and tell me the difference between Sunni and Shia? So how far have we come? And if we really want to talk about our engagement with the Islamic world, I think we need to know a little bit more in that way. So Jenkins is an extraordinary man and he straddles the different regimes, that sort of messy period between Mary into Elizabeth. He's really traveling for 20, 30 years. Amazing figure. So for me, he's kind of very, very important, and he sort of really kick and understanding that an encounter with Islamic world can be politically and commercially profitable for the Tudors, but Persia's just that little bit too far. And that's why the Ottomans come into play, because it's easier to really work with the Ottomans through the Mediterranean, because otherwise you're going up really into the Arctic Circle, going down through Murmansk, getting to Moscow. It's a hell of a journey. But Jenkinson is important, I think, in putting into view a sense in which there is an encounter out there and it could be profitable.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

But he's also getting things wrong, I suppose, would be a nice way of putting it. There are misunderstandings, of course, that happen in these moments of encounter. And I was really tickled by the fact that whilst he might be noticing the distinction between these two branches of Islam, what particularly occupies him is that they have different mustaches that Sunny's and Shia have different mustaches. I mean, like talk about sort of focusing on the small thing as opposed to the major differences.

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[Jerry Broughton]

He is trading in cloth effectively. So you're right, he endlessly is trying to work out these theological distinctions and then he kind of cuts off into a whole sort of long discourse about silk or linen, because really, that's his sort of business and that's what he's interested in. And you know, it's very important to say this is not Some absolutely bravura, cosmopolitan encounter. There's a much darker, difficult side to it. It's unclear quite how he acquires, but he either is given or is sold a slave woman called Aurea Sultana, who he brings back to England. And, you know, the description there is very difficult because he is encountering an awful sort of gender sex traffic in women and slavery. And she is a tantalizing figure again, I keep thinking often of the kind of work that you do about trying to recover those women's voices. We can't recover her voice. We seem to have a portrait of her. She comes back. There seems to be a story that she works in Elizabeth's court and that she's actually advising on, again, clothing and fashion. But she's a fascinating, tantalizing figure that's sort of really just on those margins. I'd love to know, if we could, more about that story. So that's folded into the Jenkinson story, as you say. Some of it is very open. Some of it is completely misunderstood. Much of it is driven about trade and finance, and there are people who lose out. There are victims in the middle of this story as well. And is she or is she not? You know, I loved the idea that she sort of works that through and she finds her niche in Tudor London, this woman who's come from a Circassian sort of slave culture in Central Asia. It's kind of a remarkable story. And again, these stories that we desperately want to try and get back to it. But as you know, the problem of the archive is so tantalizing in terms of what it does give us. And then when the road stops and you can't find more that you want, and you know, there's something there. Can't quite get it.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I know it all too well. Yeah. The problem of dealing with stories without endings, that's one of the challenges, isn't it? So after his return, he comes back in 1560. Elizabeth writes to the Persian emperor, the Great Sophie, they're calling him in England at the time. But really, we need to look, as you said, after the bull of excommunication, Regnis and excelsis in 1570, and we get Elizabeth sending her first ambassador to Morocco. Is that right, in the 1570s?

[Jerry Broughton]

Yeah. Informally, the trade has already been established, so there are independent merchants who are doing this work on their own back. So Jenkinson is one example. There are people working in what they call Barbary in Northwest Africa from the 1550s. Interestingly, Elizabeth always uses her proxies. So Leicester, her great favorite starts to run that trade because he sees it as very profitable. And Elizabeth is always very canny around all these commercial organizations. It's a very important issue about joint stock companies. The way in which English merchants start to build up joint stock capital to make their investments in this work to, yes, get Elizabeth's seal of approval. But it's kind of wonderfully John Le Carrier, you know, she says, but if you get your fingers burned, I'm not involved here, right, I'll take some of the cash. But, you know, you're on your own if you get burned. And Leicester fronts it a lot. So you start to get these sole traders who then morph into the Barbary Company. Leicester's pretty much bankrolling it. And they're going out really from the 1560s. And then the trade really takes off. And it's a sort of arms to Iraq story, because these figures are trading. What do they have? They don't have very much they can bring. I always think it's a funny story. What do the English have? Wool. Where does wool not play very well? Well, you know, in the Mediterranean. So, you know, you turn up in Persia with a lot of wool and people are going, you got anything else? So what do they have? Munitions. So what starts to happen, the early stages of the Barbary Company trade are that these sole traders, with the support of Leicester, are arming the Barbary kingdoms. They're taking out saltpetre and they're taking out weapons in exchange for silks, for gold from the trans Saharan trade route. And that's coming back into England. And you start to see the impact of that in sort of everyday culture. But the Barbary trade is kind of fascinating because many of the intermediaries that the English merchants are using as well are Jewish merchants. So again, you think of players like the Jew of Malta, Merchant of Venice. It's not about Venice. I think all these plays are really kickstarted by what happens in the Barbary States by English merchants working with Jewish intermediaries. So another layer again of theology and religious difference as well as trade that's going on. And again, it's very anti Spanish. So it's both enriching the English polity, but it's also giving them a bullock against Spain. And there's a great moment in 1588 where the English merchants in Marrakech start celebrating the defeat of the Armada. The Spanish who are in Marrakech then get very angry. An Englishman is attacked and wounded, and the Moroccans go, what is wrong? With you lot, what is wrong with you Christians? You know, again, it's such a fascinating moment. What's your problem? As they see these kind of apparent Christians so confident at each other's throats. So the whole Reformation moment is so fascinating that Islam is watching it, going well, this is a deeply divided religion and there's this kind of Sunni Shia issue. I think that that's always so fascinating that these two schisms are confronting each other and looking at each other in so many different complex ways. So the whole kind of Marrakesh London connection, I think is really fascinating and goes right through back to the story of Alanuri. So it runs all the way to 1600 and those diplomatic and commercial relations which are driven by, yes, trade, but also an anti Catholic and anti Spanish sentiment. How can we work together against the Spanish? And really, that is a whole argument right through to Al Anuri, which uses the language of Reconquista. Is it possible to reconquer Muslim Spain with the help of Protestant English naval power? I mean, that's just does your head in around a certain notion about what English Tudor politics is supposed to be about. And Elizabeth is like, yep, let's do this. They even talk about trying to invade the New World together. Let's knock over the Spanish settlements in the New World. Morocco's well positioned on the Atlantic. The English under Drake have a great navy. Blimey, what an amazing vault face of our understanding of that moment in time.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And there's also a new Ottoman sultan, Murad iii, who is an extraordinary character. You might want to tell us about him. And we've got another man who's sent to lead a trade deal, perhaps one of the most important men. Most of us have never heard of William Harbor. Tell us about how he fared.

[Jerry Broughton]

I mean, this is an extraordinary story, probably even more extraordinary than Jenkinson. So William Harborne is a trader from, of all places, Great Yarmouth. And in 1578 he's working with various commercial companies and he is given the role of going out to Istanbul to work with Murad III to establish a commercial deal. Francis Walsingham is very much behind it. I think that he drives it, Elizabeth signs off on it, they send Harborne out via Poland. It's very sort of cloak and dagger. He gets to Istanbul, he makes high level encounters with the Ottoman Porte in the Topkapi Sarai. These kind of great images of this Englishman from Great Yarmouth who goes to one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world and ends up in an audience with Murad iii. Who says, look, I'm the greatest emperor in the world. And, you know, he has reason to say that in terms of just the sheer scale of Ottoman territory at the time. Halborn then concocts this incredible deal called the Capitulations. It's based on the French deals that they have a commercial deal and diplomatic deal with the Ottomans, which is to be given preferential trading rights to operate in the Ottoman territories, favorable tax breaks, complete freedom. So they come under the rule, the sovereignty of the Ottomans. They cannot be harmed. And Harbon does this deal, and it's a deal which stays from 1580 to 1922, when the Ottoman Empire officially falls and the Republic is established. So it's one of the longest standing diplomatic and commercial deals in English history. Again, forgotten. And Harbaugh's accounts are extraordinary. You know, he's working across different languages. He's working very closely with the interpreters in the Ottoman court. He's then running a whole team of English merchants right through from across northwest Africa into Libya, Tripoli, they're in Aleppo, in the Turkish territories. And again, rather like the Barbary trade, it's very much about exchanging munitions for the goods that have come all the way through the Silk Road that the Ottomans control. So harbor in 1582 is then fronting this incredible situation where the Elizabethans are taking lead stripped from deconsecrated Catholic churches to make bullets to arm the Ottoman soldiers in their wars against the Spanish. Now, this is extraordinary. You know, it's really amazing. And all the Catholic powers that are in Istanbul at the time are outraged. They say, this English guy's turned up. He's captured these great preferential rates. He's now trading arms into Istanbul. And they're absolutely appalled. But because of the deal Elizabeth has done, they're outside the Catholic papal edicts which say, officially, you can't trade with infidels and heretics. Now, the Venetians have been doing it for centuries, but it's always been very low level. The English can do it with impunity. So Harborne prospers throughout the 1580s. I mean, there's some bumpiness, things go a bit wrong, but there he is. You know, he establishes a trade mission. He's running this whole group of merchants. And again, it's this idea of what's happening on the ground. You suddenly realize that you've got predominantly men, there are some women, but predominantly men who are based in Islamic territories, working, trading, exchanging, talking, literally, metaphorically, breaking bread with people they're converting quietly, sometimes forcible, Conversion, sometimes, clearly it's embraced as a sense of actually, you know, Islam is a theology which believes in one God. It does not believe in idolatry. It's a religion which superficially looks very similar to Reformed Protestantism. And Elizabeth knows that. And she writes to Murad and she says, we share similar theological approaches. We are people of the book. We do not believe in intercession. We do not believe in, of course, what she would call idolatry. They fudge a notion of Jesus, which is very interesting. So she clearly understands the notion. Fascinating that she gets that Islam understands Christ as a prophet, but that's, of course, different for Protestantism. So she slightly sidesteps that. But she also says, you are the great imperial power. You are the person I want to work with. So Harborne is ferrying these letters backwards and forwards. Murad responds. Very interestingly at first. He responds, and he's asking his team, who is this person, Isabella Vingalterra? They have no idea. They don't really know where England is. Again, it's just some small island and it's run by a woman. How extraordinary. There is a sort of deep sexism to the language of just mystification. He says, fine. His imperial power is about a big tent, and if you're prepared to accept us and be under our sovereignty, we can trade. And that's what Harborne establishes. And it prospers throughout the 1580s, even at the point that there's clearly an awareness that the Spanish Armada is coming. And this is really interesting because Harborne is then involved in trying to ensure that the Ottomans are keeping the Spanish militarily quiet in the Mediterranean to potentially disrupt the Armada that's being constructed to take over England. And I have written a lot about this, and I think, you know, this has to be part of the story that we now tell about these great national moments. It's not all about Francis straight with his bowls. It's also about what's happening in Istanbul. And it's about people like Harborne with Walsingham desperately writing to him, saying, make sure that they do not sign a peace treaty with Spain, because if they do, we are stuffed. And Harborne actually does that. And he comes back in 1588, quietly, I think, a bit of a hero because he's held that line. The Ottomans, nominally are saying that they are still at war with the Spanish. How far it affects the fleet that sails, that's questionable. But again, just what we talked about earlier, there's all the late 19th, early 20th century correspondence of Walsingham Burleigh Murad III. Elizabeth desperately trying to concoct this anti Spanish axis at that moment and that is part of that national story and part of it is that close cordial Anglo Islamic alliance. So I think Harbaughn comes back very sort of undercover as a bit of a hero when the armada fails in.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Now along the way there, you mentioned many examples of English Protestants converted to Islam. And one story you tell is of William Harbor's encounter with Hassan Agha, chief eunuch and treasurer of Algiers. Tell us about that.

[Jerry Broughton]

It's the most extraordinary story that I came across in the correspondence. So Harborne is established in Istanbul and he's working with any English merchants in particular who are being arrested. All this trouble with trade that's going on across the eastern Mediterranean and invariably he just says, look, you know there's any trouble, don't worry, we have the Sultan. The Sultan has our back. And he writes to this figure who as you say is called Hassan Agar, who is the chief eunuch and treasurer in, alas in the late 1570s, early 1580s, and he says Actually, you're called Samson Rowley, and I understand that in 1577, as a merchant, your boat was hijacked by the Ottomans. You were really forcibly converted, you were castrated as a eunuch, but now you're imperial treasurer to the ruler of Algiers. And there's this correspondence that goes back and forth, and Harborne says to Samson Rowley, he says, do you want to come back? And Samson Rowley goes, you must be joking. I live in a palace in Algiers. Why would I come back? And yet it is this point where there's a sense in which, at any moment, English Protestant culture could just be snuffed out. So at that moment, I think, do you know what? Samson Rowley's on the right side. And there's a fascinating image that we still have of Samson Rowley, which I put in the book. And it's amazing, you know, he wears a turban. You know, he's there. He looks like a very regal figure. As I remember my editor saying, there were downsides because he was castrated. And I say, yes, I know, obviously there's a downside to being castrated. But the story, again, is just phenomenal because he is one of many figures in this period who do convert. And again, you wonder what that form of conversion means. It's certainly one that, for him is enduring because he signs off as Hasan Agha. That's his role. He disappears, then from the record, he doesn't reconvert. There are many others that we see, and this builds throughout the early 17th century. The historian Nabil Matar has done a lot of brilliant work on this, on captivity narratives and conversion narratives, and there are thousands of English men and, increasingly, as the 17th century progresses, women who convert to Islam. I found only one record of a Muslim Turkish figure who converts to Anglicanism. That's it. And, boy, do the English Anglican theologians make a big deal of it. But that's it. So, again, all these encounters, you know, the Ottomans throughout this alliance with Elizabeth, there's no narrative of the Turks ever sending diplomatic embassies to London. Why would they? They're too powerful. You come to us, we don't need to go to you. And that's very much what runs throughout the 1580s and 1590s. The trade and the correspondence increases. It's an increasingly amicable relationship, but it's very much on the terms of the Ottomans, not Elizabeth's. It's the other way around.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So just a couple more things to pick up on, because you've said that we've got William Harborne in Istanbul. Constantinople, as it's been called. Henry Roberts is another man who's now in Marrakech trying to convince these Islamic rulers to back Elizabeth against Spain. But what is never achieved is the goal of a joint Anglo Islamic attack on the Spanish fleet or armies. Why not?

[Jerry Broughton]

I think the Ottomans don't see it as realistic. I think that the Moroccans come closest to doing it, but the alliances are always so shifting. So the Moroccans are, of course, antagonistic to the Ottomans, so you can't make an enduring deal there. So the English can't ever tie it together sufficiently, I think, and are never clear enough about, well, what do they want in the end? I think it's survival. They just want to survive. And post 1588, I think some of the heat of that situation kind of dies away. Certainly for the Ottomans, there's no notion that you are trying some form of reconquista. The Barbary States are just not militarily as powerful as the Ottomans. The Ottomans then break away, because throughout this period, and it's what we were talking about with Anthony Jenkinson, that what the Ottomans are really concerned about is Persia, the interest in Europe is pretty hit and miss. You know, you get as far as Vienna, but there is no notion of really going beyond there. Because what do you get from Europe? Probably not that much, but what you get from Persia and India and China, that's much more significant for the Ottomans. And there's very much that story that throughout this period, as the Ottoman sultans look increasingly inward, they also look increasingly eastward. That's their big centre of conflict, not westwards. And again, the Elizabethans are just bit players, so it's never possible to really put that together. And then, you know, the Elizabethans are moving in different directions, the new world sort of appears. And that seems to be perhaps more of an interesting area of development around conquest, because, again, all this stuff is very much. We see this period, colonization, conquest. Well, not so much, you know, Virginia, tiny little sort of toehold in that. There's no notion of conquest going further east because it's just unthinkable. You're not going to try and conquer areas that the Ottomans are controlling. It's just logistically, practically, absolutely impossible. And you're right, because, you know, in the official diplomatic context, nothing really sticks. So there's always been a tradition of saying, well, so it wasn't really meaningful, it didn't really endure. Well, I think the fallout, you know, in terms of what people were saying were eating, were encountering the Language changes, the words which enter the English language, the way in which the domestic economy changes in terms of what people are eating, what they're wearing, their understanding of a wider international horizon, their understanding of different religious beliefs, that is profound, I think. And again, it's why, when we start telling the stories, I hate the phrase ordinary people, because everybody's extraordinary. But it's that sense of which, if we could recover that, I think we would have a much richer story about why these encounters are so powerful and so profound.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I think that's absolutely right. And it's very clear from your work that we're seeing connections between Elizabethan England and the Islamic world played out in English culture, in English fashion. And as you've mentioned, that we have These more than 60 Elizabethan and Jacobean players with these Islamic characters or settings or themes. I suppose the last question would be on that point. When we are looking at these plays and we're looking at these theatrical depictions, how are these characters being depicted? Is it negative? Is it wholly sort of a judgment that is not positive towards those who are not English? Or is there anything positive we can find there?

[Jerry Broughton]

Well, here's a little confession, because my day job, although I'm a professor of Renaissance Studies, which covers a multitude of sins, is that I teach literature. So I was trained in literature, although I was very interdisciplinary. So that is what I teach. And my view is that then you're dealing with a different body of material. So it's different if you're looking at a merchant's correspondence to a piece of drama that obviously works in a very different way. So my view is that, yes, you could say there's a very negative representation. So you see Marlow's plays, you see the representation of Tamburlain, you see the representation of the Ottoman Turks. It's blood soaked, it's violent. Othello, you could say, you know, this is a murderous husband who's racialized as a Moor. And so this is a sort of denigration of the figure of the Moor, the figure of Islam. And that is there. There's no doubt, and I don't want to shy away from that. But at the same time, there is a fascination, there is an understanding that this has affected your culture. There is a sense in which that's why I teach Othello. My view is not to sort of say this is an image of cosmopolitan religious accommodation and some attempt at sort of comparative religious meeting. Not at all, not at all. It's about a dangerous, conflicted, violent encounter and will Othello kill you or will he save you? And that's precisely, tragically, where Desdemona sits. And I think that that's what I'd call the ambivalence. Ambivalence is not ambiguity. Ambivalence is you can love or you can hate at the same time. And that's why the drama is so important. That's why play like Othello still stays with us and more than ever has that charge. I worked recently with English touring company with Richard Twyman, who came to me and said, I've read your book and I want to take seriously the idea that Othello is a Muslim and let's embed that within the performance. And we took it into towns and cities with significant Muslim communities and it was electrifying to watch. And it told me that that's what's going on. It's not a sense that we need to either sort of love Othello or hate him. It's to say he sits at the end of this huge tradition of an Anglo Islamic encounter, which is deeply ambivalent. Will these people save us or will they sell us to hell politically? Will we prosper with them commercially, will they enrich us? We're really not sure. But a lot of time and energy and encounter is going into that. And that's why I think a play like Othello is so cracklingly still alive. And I think now more than ever after 9, 11 and 77, on what's going on with Islamophobia in this country, it still has that charge, it still has that power. And that seems to me to key us back in to just the complexity of the history about those Anglo Islamic relations in the 16th century.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I think that what is so important about your work is that you are drawing together evidence from literature and evidence from those accounts on the ground and doing that cross discipline work that makes your resulting narratives so rich. And I think what it absolutely has done is it's giving us this new way of seeing the culture of the Elizabethan period and a new narrative about geopolitics in the aftermath of the Reformation, that we have these alliances with Islamic powers beyond Europe that are a consequence of England's fallout with Catholic Europe. And that is fascinating and so important.

So thank you so much for coming on, not just the Tudors to talk about it. And if you're wondering what the book that we've been talking about is, I'm going to remind you that it's called this Orient Isle.

Thanks for listening to not just the Tudors. And to my researcher Alice Smith and.

My producer Rob Weinberg.

And do join me, Professor Cesia Lipscomb.

Next time for another episode of Not Just the Tutors from History.

Hit.

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Our Skin Tells a Story Join me, Holly Fry and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.